But there are other people, indeed some of the same people who have preferences
for violent crime. For whom a year stretch in a prison is
not as bad as it would be for somebody whose life prospects are better.
Perhaps this person is himself a violent person and therefore somebody to be
feared rather than somebody who will experiience fear in a prison.
And many people have acculturated themselves to prison life.
They get accustomed to it. And for many of them the aspect of life
on the outside, like gangs, are brought in to the prison as well.
so if somebody who is in a position of leadership in the gang outside the prison
may still be in the same position of leadership inside the prison.
And therefore find his conditions of confinement, as it were, somewhat less
onerous then they would be under other circumstances.
All of this goes to say that there are differeent strokes for different folks.
Different people have different preferences even with respect to the
commission of crimes. And different people experience different
levels of dis-utility from equal levels of criminal liabilty, from different,
from equal levels of criminal punishment. And given all of these things, given the
existence of people who take pleasure in violence and given the.
widespread nature of opportunities for crime, there are efficient crimes all
around us, and the criminal justice system aims to distinguish them from
inefficient crimes. A second frequently asked question is
suggested by our friend Jeremy Bentham, who we met earlier in the course.
In his famous book Principles of Morals and Legislation written in 1781, Bentham
considers the question of whether or not people calculate costs and benefits.
Whether there rational in the sense that economists assume people are rational.
Who is there, he asks, that does not calculate?
Men calculate, some with less exactness, some with more but all men calculate.
I would not say that even a madman does not calculate.
So Bentham suggests a second frequently asked question about the model of
criminal liability that I've offered in the previous lecture.
Are criminals rational? Do they calculate before they act?
Economists assume that consumers are rational, that consumers in fact don't
make what we usually call impulse purchases.
Buying goods without really thinking about whether they need them or whether
there worth the price. Sometimes we buy goods habitually, but
that's because we're pretty certain that the benefits of buying the good will
exceed the price of the good so we tend not to think about it very much.
But economists assume that every important decision, at least every
important economic decision that people make is based on a calculation.
People look at the situation and see what benefits will return to them from each
course of action, what cost will be incurred to them by each course of
action. And they pick the cost of action that has
the greatest difference between benefit and cost.
This is what it means to be rational. Benthem argues that Criminals are
rational. And though, so Benthem would answer the
question on the screen, are criminals just like you and me, by saying yes,
criminals are just like you and me. This is the view that has been taken by
most modern economists who've studied the economics of crime.
Present company included. We do believe that he, that criminals are
rational. We do believe that they in fact think
about things more often than they don't. And indeed, we think that criminals are
just like you and me. Notice though, if you've studied
sociology that there's a school of sociological or criminal logical thought.
That was dominant in the middle part of the twentieth century which took a
different view of criminals. It said that criminals were deviants,
that they were ill in some way, and that they were different from people who were
not criminals. This view is that criminals are a
distinct group characterized by their propensity toward criminality.
And that people display this propensity or they don't.
And that crimes are committed overwhelimingly by those people who are
in the class of people who are potential criminals.
And not committed very much at all by those pople who are in the class of
people who are not potential criminals. The economic approach, epitomized here by
Jeremy Bentham, is not so much that criminals are just like you and me, but
that you and I are just like the criminals.
That everybody's a potential criminal and that everybody calculates.
What distinguishes people who commit crimes from people who don't commit
crimes It's not that the people who commit crimes are somehow intrinsically
criminals. Or that they are somehow unable to
control their behavior in a way that the rest of us are able to control.
It's simply a judgment on the part of the criminal that the criminal act given it's
price is worth committing. And a judgement on the part of the person
who is not a criminal, not to commit the criminal act, because the price of the
crime, is in fact, not worth paying. Of course, in the real-world some people
commit crimes without thinking about it. In much the same way that some people buy
objects in a store, on impulse, without ever thinking about them.
An archetypal crime of passion is committed by a man who unexpectedly walks
into his home and finds his wife in bed with another man.
he loses it as they say. He reaches for a gun and he shoots them
both dead. And when the crime has been committed,
and he's come back to his senses. He looks with horror at what he has done
and he explains honestly to the police that at the moment that the shooting took
place he wasn't thinking about anything. That he was so distraught, so angry and
upset by what he had seen that his ratrionale simply departed.
He was taken over by his baser instincts, he could not control this instinct, could
not, could not think about the consequences of the action.
He just acted in the heat of the moment and in the heat of the moment, two people
were dead. I believe that such people don't think
before they act. I'm persuaded that crimes of passion are
committed by people who when they commit the crime have done nothing like
calculate the consequences. And compare those consequences to the
satisfaction of the act. Some crimes do have that rational quality
to them. Indeed we sometimes think of those kinds
of crimes as the worst kinds of crimes because they're premeditated and people
have clearly given them a lot of thought. But many crimes don't have that quality.
They're crimes of passion and we tend to be more understanding of criminals of
passion Then we are of criminals of calculation.
Many of us can imagine ourselves in the same situation as that poor fellow who
shot his wife and her lover. Even if we think we might not have done
the same that he did. And our feelings of injustice, torward
what he has done, are emelurated, somewhat by the situation in which he
finds himself. I'll sympathize with him a little bit
more than we sympathize with the first-degree murderer.
But we don't sympathize with him, we punish him.
We may reduce the crime that he commits from first-degree or premeditated,
thoughtful, rational, calculated murder Down to a lesser offense, say voluntary
manslaughter or even involuntary manslaughter.
Both of which don't require an intention to actually act or kill and both of which
are punished with much lower penalties than the penalty for murder.